"Hundred and seventy next April. But the years aren't getting any shorter, Lloyd, contrary to public opinion. Why do they have to stack me in the rear? I get nervous when I see the wings turn red hot." He shifted uncomfortably.

Judy Greenberg came back from the rest room and sat down next to Lloyd. Luke was across the aisle, in the space made by removing two chairs before takeoff. Judy seemed to have recovered nicely; she looked and moved as if she had just left a beauty parlor. From a distance her face was calm. Garner could see the slight tension in the muscles around the eyes, in the cheeks, through the neck. But Garner was very old. He had his own, non-psychic way of reading minds. He said, as if to empty air, "We'll be landing in half an hour. Greenberg will be sleeping peacefully until we get there."

"Good," said Judy. She leaned forward and turned on the tridee screen in the seat ahead.

Kzanol felt a brand new and horribly unpleasant sensation, and woke up sputtering. It was the scent of ammonia in his nostrils. He woke up sputtering and gagging and bent on mass murder. The first slave he saw, he ordered to kill itself in a horrible manner.

The slave smiled tremulously at him. "Darling, are you all right?" Her voice was terribly strained and her smile was a lie.

Everything came back in a rush. That was Judy… "Sure, beautiful, I'm fine. Would you step outside while these good people ask me some questions?"

"Yes, Larry." She stood up and left, hurrying. Kzanol waited until the door was closed before he turned on the others.

"You." He faced the man in the travel chair. He must be in charge; he was obviously the oldest. "Why did you subject Judy to this?"

"I was hoping it would jog your memory. Did it?"

"My memory is perfect. I even remember that Judy is a sentient female, and that the idea of my not being Larry Greenberg would be a considerable shock to her. That's why I sent her away."

"Good for you. Your females aren't sentient?"

"No. It must be strange to have a sentient mate." Kzanol dug momentarily into Greenberg's memories, smiled a dirty smile, then got back to the business at hand. "How did you bring me down?"

The old one shrugged. "Easy enough. We put you to sleep with a sonic, then took over your car's autopilot. The only risk was that you might be on manual. By the way, I'm Garner. That's Masney."

Kzanol took the information without comment. He saw that Masney was a stocky man, so wide that he seemed much shorter than his six feet two inches, and his hair and eating tendrils or whatever were dead white.

Masney was staring thoughtfully at Kzanol. It was the kind of look a new biology student gives a preserved sheep's heart before he goes to work with the scalpel.

"Greenberg," he said, "why'd you do it?"

Kzanol didn't answer.

"Jansky's lost both his eyes and most of his face. Knudsen will be a cripple for nearly a year; you cut his spinal cord. With this." He pulled the disintegrator out of a drawer. "Why? Did you think it would make you king of the world? That's stupid. It's only a hand weapon."

"It's not even that," said Kzanol. He found it easy to speak English. All he had to do was relax. "It's a digging or cutting tool, or a shaping instrument. Nothing more."

Masney stared. "Greenberg," he whispered, as if he were afraid of the answer, "who do you think you are?"

Kzanol tried to tell him. He almost strangled doing it. Overtalk didn't fit human vocal cords. "Not Greenberg," he managed. "Not a… slave. Not human."

"Then what?"

He shook his head, rubbing his throat.

"Okay. How does this innocuous tool work?"

"You push that little button and the beam starts removing surface material."

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh. Well, it suppresses the… charge on the electron. I think that's right. Then whatever is in the beam starts to tear itself apart. We use the big ones to sculpture mountains." His voice dropped to a whisper. "We did." He started to choke, caught himself. Masney frowned.

Garner asked, "How long were you underwater?"

"I think between one and two billion years. Your years or mine, they aren't that much different."

"Then your race is probably dead."

"Yes." Kzanol looked at his hands, unbelievingly. "How in-" he gurgled, recovered, "how under the Power did I get into this body? Greenberg thought that was only a telepathy machine!"

Garner nodded. "Right. And you've been in that body, so to speak, all along. The alien's memories were superimposed on your brain, Greenberg. You've been doing the same thing with dolphins for years, but it never affected you this way. What's the matter with you, Greenberg? Snap out of it!"

The slave in the travel chair made no move to kill himself. "You," Kzanol/Greenberg paused to translate, "whitefood. You despicable, decaying, crippled whitefood with defective sex organs. Stop telling me who I am! I know who I am!" He looked down at his hands. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and ran itching down his cheeks, but his face remained as expressionless as a moron's. Garner blinked at him. "You think you are what's-his-name, the alien terror from Outer Space? Nuts. The alien terror is down on the first floor of this building, and he's perfectly harmless. If we could get him back to normal time he would be the first to call you an impostor. Later I'll take you down and show him to you.

"Part of what you said is true. I am, of course, an old man. But what is a, er, whitefood?" He made the word a separate question.

Kzanol had calmed down. "I translated. The whitefood is an artificial animal, created by the tnuctipun as a meat animal. A whitefood is as big as a dinosaur and as smooth and white as a shmoo. They're a lot like shmoos. We can use all of their bodies, except the skeleton, and they eat free food, which is almost as cheap as air. Their shape is like a caterpillar reaching for a leaf. The mouth is at the front of the belly foot."

"Free food?"

Kzanol/Greenberg didn't hear him. "That's funny. Garner, do you remember the pictures of bandersnatchi that the second Jinx expedition sent back? Greenberg was going to read a bandersnatch mind someday."

"Sure. Hey!"

"Bandersnatchi are whitefoods," said Kzanol/Greenberg. "They don't have minds."

"I guessed that. But, son, you've got to remember that they've had two billion years to develop minds."

"It wouldn't help them. They can't mutate. They were designed that way. A whitefood is one big cell, with a chromosome as long as your arm and as thick as your little finger. Radiation could never affect them, and the first thing that would be harmed by any injury would be the budding apparatus." Kzanol/Greenberg was bewildered. What price another coincidence? "Why would anyone think they were intelligent?"

"Well, for one thing," Garner said mildly, "the report said the brain was tremendous. Weighed as much as a three-year-old boy."

Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. "They were designed for that, too. The brain of a whitefood has a wonderful flavor, so the tnuctip engineers increased its size. So?"

"So it's convoluted like a human brain."

Why, so it was. Like a human brain, and a tnuctip brain, and a thrint brain, for that matter. Now why-

Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn't do it again. The mystery of the intelligent «bandersnatch» bothered him, but he had other things to worry about. Why, for example, hadn't he been rescued? Three hundred years after he pushed the panic button, he must have struck the Earth like the destroying wrath of the Powergiver. Someone on the moon must have seen it.

Could the lunar observation post have been abandoned?

Why?

Garner crashed into his thoughts. "Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley or a meteor storm."